Edgar Allan Poe
1) The Raven
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The Raven Edgar Allan Poe - In Gustave Doré, one of the most prolific and successful book illustrators of the late 19h century, Edgar Allan Poe's renowned poem The Raven found perhaps its most perfect artistic interpreter. Doré's dreamlike, otherworldly style, tinged with melancholy, seems ideally matched to the bleak despair of Poe's celebrated work, among the most popular American poems ever written.This volume reprints all 26 of Doré's detailed,...
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"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story begins with the unnamed narrator arriving at the house of his friend, Roderick Usher, having received a letter from him in a distant part of the country complaining of an illness and asking for his help. Although Poe wrote this short story before the invention of modern psychological science, Roderick's condition can be described according to its terminology. It includes...
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E. A. Poe's short story follows Prince Prospero and his friends' futile attempt to outrun and outsmart a deadly plague, called the Red Death. The heart of the story is presented as a masquerade where the guests revel in mirth and intoxication, oblivious of the horrors that await them. The author's narrative techniques revolve around symbolism (number seven, the clock, the black chamber) and provides an allegorical halo around the short story. Witnessing...
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Poe's preference for not naming his narrators is potent once again in "The Tell-Tale Heart", a story that is trying so hard to appear sane, but fails miserably in the end. With minute preparations, perfect calculations, and even more precise execution of the conceived gruesome act, the narrator successfully fulfils his purpose, only to be lost in a battle with his sanity and guilt afterwards. Backed by the numerous movie and theatrical adaptations,...
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Embarking upon a journey to discover the limits of one's sanity and guilty conscience, "The Black Cat" is a perfect example of how no bad deed goes unpunished. Obsessively dark and violent, the story draws a psychological portrait of Poe's own miserable life spent in depression and alcoholism. Together with the superstitious symbolism of the black cat, Poe's narrative teems with guilt, violence, and dark portents. Similar to "The Tell-Tale Heart"...
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First published in a 1841 edition of Graham's Magazine, The Murders in the Rue Morgue is often cited as the first modern detective story. The first of three stories to center around C. Auguste Dupin, Poe's fictional detective, The Murders in the Rue Morgue involves Dupin's investigation of two women's murders. Establishing many of the tropes that would later become common to detective fiction, the story begins with an explanation of Dupin's theory...
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"The Cask of Amontillado" is a classic revenge story where an insulted man, Montresor, exacts his vengeance upon the drunk Fortunato. Just like "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat", Poe offers the perspective to the perpetrator of the vile deed, who descends into madness with every step of his narrative. What begins like a normal wine-tasting journey is about to become a sinister plunge into oblivion, as Montresor's insulted, yet clearly mad...
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'It was unnecessary for all to perish, when, by the death of one, it was possible, and even probable, that the rest might be finally preserved.'
Travelling aboard a whaling vessel, a young stowaway is swept up in myriad misadventures - mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism - narrowly escaping numerous brushes with death. This rousing story of a daring sea voyage also presents its antihero with a host of psychological dilemmas, and offers an important insight...
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C. Auguste Dupin, the amateur detective from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget" returns for the last time to solve a mystery involving a stolen letter, some blackmail, and the queen. In a series of fortunate and elaborate endeavours, Poe's third detective story is an example of how professionals do not always have all the answers, and that from time to time one needs to think outside the box. The result is a complex situation...
10) The Gold-Bug
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Inspired by the developments in cryptography and the gradually emerging detective fiction, "The Gold-Bug" surely got mixed critical reception from the public. Hailed as both "ingenious" and "trashy", the story's influence cannot be neglected, and surely Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" can vouch for that. What is more, the use of cipher in the story brought to the fore the interest in puzzles and hidden objects that would later be developed...
11) William Wilson
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Inspired by Poe's own tragic life, the short story clearly presages Freud's method of psychoanalysis. In a very Fight-club-like plot and situations, "William Wilson" is a journey within the mind. Some sixty years prior to Freud's clinical work and theoretical developments, Poe's story is an example of the rise of the psychological genre in literature.
A fruitful, and at the same time paranoid, the theme of the doppelganger runs strong in Edgar Allan...
12) Hop-Frog
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As with "The Cask of Amontillado", this story is centred around revenge as the only possible outcome for the insulted protagonist. Disrespect breeds revenge, which tinted with allegory and served with less terrific elements, manages to crown justice on top. It is a story about the triumph of the little people, acting in revenge for the violent and bestial needs of the big ones. And finally, when the masks are down, the reader can clearly see who the...
13) El cuervo
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El Cuervo, es un largo poema escrito por Edgar Allan Poe que fue publicado en 1845. Una pequeña historia misteriosa que encierra muchos más mensajes de los que parece a simple vista. Esta edición bilingüe, contiene una fiel traducción del mismo. En ella descubrirá la pureza en el lenguaje de dicho autor, el cual, revive gracias a que el trabajo se ha efectuado con el máximo rigor y precisión. Lo que hace de este libro un perfecto apoyo para...
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The only full-length novel by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" was first published in 1838. It is the story of a boy from Nantucket, Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship, the "Grampus", with the help of his friend Augustus, the ship captain's son. Pym and Augustus experience many unexpected adventures and misfortunes at sea, including mutiny, violent storms, cannibalism, and the destruction of the ship. Eventually,...
15) Ligeia
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The unnamed narrator describes the qualities of Ligeia, a beautiful, passionate and intellectual woman, raven-haired and dark-eyed, that he thinks he remembers meeting "in some large, old decaying city near the Rhine." He is unable to recall anything about the history of Ligeia, including her family's name, but remembers her beautiful appearance. Her beauty, however, is not conventional. He describes her as emaciated, with some "strangeness." He describes...
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One of E. A. Poe's more horror-oriented stories, "The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar" presents the author's obsession with death, scientific experiments, and resurrection. Playing around with forbidden and unscientific methods, Poe vehemently tries to exhibit his own medical knowledge to the reading public, asking for some sort of pardon for the horrific and disgusting end of his experiment. The depiction of gore and "detestable putrescence" paves...
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The first-person unnamed narrator describes his struggle with "attacks of the singular disorder which physicians have agreed to term "catalepsy", a condition where he randomly falls into a death-like trance. This leads to his fear of being buried alive. He emphasises his fear by mentioning several people who have been buried alive. In the first case, the tragic accident was only discovered much later, when the victim's crypt was reopened. In others,...
18) The Oblong Box
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The story opens with the narrator recounting a summer sea voyage from aboard the ship 'Independence'. The narrator learns that his old college friend Cornelius Wyatt is aboard with his wife and two sisters, though he has reserved three state-rooms. After conjecturing the extra room was for a servant or extra baggage, he learns his friend has brought on board an oblong pine box: "It was about six feet in length by two and a half in breadth." The narrator...
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When Hans Pfaal's creditors begin to circle, there is only one thing he can do. Construct a magnificent, science defying balloon and escape to the moon! Hans records the details of this voyage with vivid otherworldly description, and impressive scientific knowhow. This fascinating, hallucinatory adventure, is regarded as one of the first examples of the modern science fiction genre, inspiring works by later writers such as Jules Verne and H.G Wells....
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A representative of Poe's tales of the sea, "Ms. Found in a Bottle" follows the writer's infatuation with the horrific and unknown forces around us. An avid reader just like his creator, the narrator finds solace within books and ancient lore, thus testing the limits of one's imagination, and at the same time paving the road for further exploration of the unknown. Poe's otherworldly narrative could easily fall in the same category as the sea voyages...